A National Security Agency employee was able to secretly
intercept the phone calls of nine foreign women for six years without ever
being detected by his managers, the agency's internal watchdog has revealed.
The unauthorised abuse of the NSA's surveillance tools only
came to light after one of the women, who happened to be a US government
employee, told a colleague that she suspected the man – with whom she was
having a sexual relationship – was listening to her calls.
The case is among 12 documented in a letter from the NSA's
inspector general to a leading member of Congress, who asked for a breakdown of
cases in which the agency's powerful surveillance apparatus was deliberately
abused by staff. One relates to a member of the US military who, on the first
day he gained access to the surveillance system, used it to spy on six email
addresses belonging to former girlfriends.
The letter, from Dr George Ellard, only lists cases that
were investigated and later "substantiated" by his office. But it
raises the possibility that there are many more cases that go undetected. In a
quarter of the cases, the NSA only found out about the misconduct after the
employee confessed.
It also reveals limited disciplinary action taken against
NSA staff found to have abused the system. In seven cases, individuals guilty
of abusing their powers resigned or retired before disciplinary action could be
taken. Two civilian employees kept their jobs – and, it appears, their security
clearance – and escaped with only a written warning after they were found to
have conducted unauthorised interceptions.
The abuses – technically breaches of the law – did not
result in a single prosecution, even though more than half of the cases were
referred to the Department of Justice. The DoJ did not respond to a request for
information about why no charges were brought.
The NSA's director, Gen Keith Alexander, referred to the 12
cases in testimony to a congressional hearing on Thursday. He told senators on
the intelligence committee that abuse of the NSA's powerful monitoring tools
were "with very rare exception" unintentional mistakes.
"The press claimed evidence of thousands of privacy
violations. This is false and misleading," he said.
"According to NSA's independent inspector general,
there have been only 12 substantiated case of willful violation over 10 years.
Essentially, one per year."
He added: "Today, NSA has a privacy compliance program
any leader of a large, complex organization would be proud of."
However, the small number cases depicted in the inspector
general's letter, which was published by Republican senator Chuck Grassley,
could betray a far larger number that NSA managers never uncovered.
One of the cases emerged in 2011 ,when an NSA employee based
abroad admitted during a lie-detector case that he had obtained details about
his girlfriend's telephone calls "out of curiosity". He retired last
year.
In a similar case, from 2005, an NSA employee admitted to
obtaining his partner's phone data to determine whether she was
"involved" with any foreign government officials. In a third, a
female NSA employee said she listened to calls on an unknown foreign telephone
number she discovered stored on his cell phone, suspecting he "had been
unfaithful".
In another case, from two years ago, which was only
discovered during an investigation another matter, a woman employee of the
agency confessed that she had obtained information about the phone of "her
foreign-national boyfriend and other foreign nationals". She later told
investigators she often used the NSA's surveillance tools to investigate the
phone numbers of people she met socially, to ensure they were "not shady
characters".
The letter states that the member of staff
twice collected communications of an American, and "tasked nine telephone
numbers of female foreign nationals, without a valid foreign intelligence
purpose, and listened to collected phone conversations".
No comments:
Post a Comment